Daniel Bennett is Associate Professor of Political Science at John Brown University and Assistant Director for the Center for Faith and Flourishing. He is author of Defending Faith: The Politics of the Christian Conservative Legal Movement (Kansas, 2017) and has contributed essays to Religion and Politics, Christianity Today, and The Gospel Coalition, among others.
Kraig Beyerlein is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society, at the University of Notre Dame, a faculty affiliate at the Center for the Study of Social Movements, a faculty fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Latino Studies. His research and teaching focuses on the intersection of religion and collective action, especially civic engagement and protest activity. Published articles on these and related topics appear in the American Sociological Review, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Mobilization, Poetics, Politics and Religion, Social Forces, Social Problems, Social Science Research, Sociological Methods and Research, and the Sociology of Religion.
Cammie Jo Bolin is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at University at Albany, SUNY. Her research interests include identity, participation, and women’s leadership in political and religious contexts. With Benjamin Knoll, she is coauthor of She Preached the Word: Women’s Ordination in Modern America (Oxford University Press, 2018). She holds a B.A. in politics and history from Centre College and a Ph.D. in American government from Georgetown University.
Ryan Burge is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Eastern Illinois University. He is the author of The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going as well as 20 Myths about Religion and Politics in America. He has published over two dozen peer-reviewed articles in a variety of outlets in the social sciences. In addition, he has written editorials for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. His work has appeared in a variety of additional outlets including the Washington Post, NPR, NBC News, MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, Vox, C-SPAN, Christianity Today, and Religion News Service. He is the cofounder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience.
Ryon J. Cobb is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Georgia. His program of research centers on the causes and consequences of racial stratification in the United States. This includes examining how perceived discrimination relates to biological and mortality risk among older adults and assesses whether this relationship varies with one’s racial self-classification, with a separate line of work operationalizing the idea that racial identification is a multidimensional social construct. He has published in Sociology of Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Social Forces, and Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, among many others.
Melissa Deckman is the Chief Executive Officer of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). She is author of Tea Party Women: Mama Grizzlies, Grassroots Activists and the Changing Face of the American Right (NYU Press, 2016) and writes about gender, religion, and politics. Her first book School Board Battles: The Christian Right in Local Politics (Georgetown University Press, 2005) won the American Political Science Association’s Hubert Morken Award for the best book on religion and politics. Her new work focuses on Generation Z’s political engagement.
Paul A. Djupe directs the Data for Political Research program at Denison University and is an affiliated scholar with PRRI. He is the book series editor of Religious Engagement in Democratic Politics (Temple University Press) and coeditor of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion (Oxford, 2020) and The Evangelical Crackup: The Future of the Evangelical-Republican Coalition (Temple, 2018). He is the cocreator of and a frequent contributor to religioninpublic.blog and regularly contributes to media coverage of American religion and politics.
Amanda Friesen is Associate Professor of Political Science and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Western Ontario and the Canada Research Chair in Political Psychology (Tier 2). She researches and teaches about the intersection of gender, religion, and personality with political engagement, using psychological methods and theory to explore these domains. Her work has appeared in Political Behavior, the International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Politics and the Life Sciences, Social Science Quarterly, Politics and Gender, and Politics and Religion.
Joshua B. Grubbs, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of psychology at Bowling Green State University. His work generally focuses on personality, addiction, and religion. He maintains a particular interest in the intersection of personality traits and moral values in predicting controversial behavior.
Donald Haider-Markel is Professor of Political Science at the University of Kansas. His research and teaching focuses on the representation of group interests in politics and policy and the dynamics between public opinion, political behavior, and public policy.
Ian Huff is a Senior Research Associate at Public Religion Research Institute. He brings expertise in strategic public opinion research with a focus on elections and issue advocacy. Prior to joining PRRI, he worked for several years as an analyst at the Feldman Group, managing survey research for campaigns for the Senate, House, and governorships, as well as for issue advocacy and labor groups. Before entering the research field, he spent several election cycles working as a campaign field staffer in Virginia and Florida.
Natalie Jackson is the research director at Public Religion Research Institute and has held senior and management positions in media, academia, and nonprofit organizations. Natalie received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Oklahoma and was a postdoctoral associate at the Duke University Initiative on Survey Methodology. Her work has appeared in the peer-reviewed journals Electoral Studies and Social Science Quarterly, as well as in several edited volumes.
Robert P. Jones is the President and founder of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). He received his Ph.D. in religion from Emory University, an M.Div. from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a B.S. in computing science and mathematics from Mississippi College. He is author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won a 2021 American Book Award, and The End of White Christian America, which won the 2019 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. Jones writes regularly on politics, culture, and religion for The Atlantic online, NBC Think, and other outlets.
Jason Klocek is Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. His work has appeared in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the Journal for the Social Scientific Study of Religion, and a number of edited volumes.
Benjamin R. Knoll manages the Survey and Analytics Hub at APQC, the world’s foremost authority in benchmarking, best practices, process and performance improvement, and knowledge management. He was previously the John Marshall Harlan Associate Professor of Politics at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. He earned a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Iowa. With Cammie Jo Bolin, he is the coauthor of She Preached the Word: Women’s Ordination in Modern America (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Andrew R. Lewis is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati and a public fellow at PRRI. He is author of The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics: How Abortion Transformed the Culture Wars (Cambridge, 2017), and his work has appeared in several social science journals and popular media outlets.
Jianing Li (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. Her work examines the intersection of mis/disinformation, contentious politics, and social inequality. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Communication, Human Communication Research, Political Communication, Mass Communication and Society, and Social Media + Society.
Natasha Altema McNeely is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Her research areas within U.S. government and politics include race and ethnicity, political institutions, political behavior, and voting, campaigns, and elections. She has recently started to examine the political ramifications of Black maternal mortality.
Matthew R. Miles is Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University, Idaho. He has published over a dozen articles and a book exploring the interaction between individual traits and institutional arrangements. Much of that work focuses on how identities influence political and religious attitudes and behaviors.
Shayla F. Olson is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan. She studies American political behavior and political communication, with a particular focus on religion and racial attitudes. In her research, she utilizes a combination of text-as-data and experimental methods to analyze racialized political learning within churches and its effect on the racial attitudes of white evangelicals.
Diana Orcés is Assistant Director of Research at Public Religion Research Institute and has held positions in academia and nonprofit organizations. Prior to joining PRRI, she was a research analyst at the American Immigration Council (AIC), Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Oakland University, and a researcher for the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP). She has published in such journals as the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Latin American Politics and Society, Latin American Research Review, and Studies in Comparative International Development.
Samuel L. Perry is Associate Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma. His work examines the interplay of power and culture within the empirical contexts of American religion, race relations, politics, and sexuality. He is coauthor of Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States.
Jenna Reinbold is Associate Professor of Religion at Colgate University, where she studies contemporary intersections of religion and politics, religion and the culture wars, and religion and human rights. She has published in the Journal of Church and State and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Her recent book, Seeing the Myth in Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania, 2017), received an Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion from the American Academy of Religion.
Kelly Rolfes-Haase is an Analyst at the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). Her research areas of expertise include American public policy, policy analysis and evaluation, and the study of identity and politics. She holds a B.A. in anthropology from Rollins College, a joint M.P.P.-M.A. in international affairs and M.A. in American government from Georgetown University, and a Ph.D. in American government from Georgetown University.
Stella M. Rouse is Professor in the Department of Government and Politics and Director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland. She is coauthor (with Ashley Ross) of The Politics of Millennials: Political Beliefs and Policy Preferences of America’s Most Diverse Generation (University of Michigan Press, 2018) and author of Latinos in the Legislative Process: Interests and Influence (Cambridge University Press, 2013). She has published articles on Millennials and attitudes about climate change and immigration, the effects of gender on attitudes about COVID-19 among Generation Z, how electoral structures influence minority representation, and the role of religion on ethnoracial political attitudes.
Angel Saavedra Cisneros is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bowdoin College. His work focuses on the role of ethnic identity in political behavior and psychology. He also looks at how identity and immigration interact across different contexts.
Justin A. Tucker is Director of the Center for Public Policy and Associate Professor of Political Science at California State University, Fullerton. He specializes in research design and analysis, program evaluation, and public policy.
Dilara K. Üsküp is Joint Assistant Professor in Internal Medicine at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science and in Family Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research investigates the ways religious and political institutions, attitudes, and ideology interact and shape health behavior to inform public policy. Presently, Dr. Üsküp is a coprincipal investigator of an NIH-funded grant (5T32MH109205-03) increasing the use of technology to deploy preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV prevention. Her burgeoning research portfolio includes the areas of politics and theology, cannabis and social equity, and health policy. Dr. Üsküp is a joint doctoral graduate of the University of Chicago’s Department of Political Science and the Divinity School.
Abigail Vegter is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Berry College, specializing in American politics, public policy, and research methodology. She maintains an active research agenda focusing on the relationship between religion and gun ownership in the United States, among other things, with publications in Politics and Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and Interest Groups and Advocacy.
Michael W. Wagner is Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication and Director of the Center for Communication at Civic Renewal at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and holds affiliations with the Department of Political Science, the La Follette School of Public Affairs, the Elections Research Center, the Mass Communication Research Center, and the Tommy G. Thompson Center for Public Leadership. He is the founding editor of the Forum section of the journal Political Communication. A winner of multiple research, teaching, and service awards, his work focuses on examining how the flow of information in various contexts affects public opinion and political behavior. His research appears in such outlets as Journal of Communication, Annual Review of Political Science, Human Communication Research, and Politics and Religion. His most recent book, Mediated Democracy: Politics, the News and Citizenship in the 21stCentury (Sage CQ Press) was published in the fall of 2020.
Andrew L. Whitehead is Associate Professor of Sociology at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis and is Codirector of the Association of Religion Data Archives. His work focuses on religious nationalism, politics, sexuality, and childhood disability. He is coauthor of Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States.
Angelia R. Wilson is Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester. She has published widely on the intersection of religion, values, and politics in America with five books and several academic journal articles. An experienced political commentator on American politics, Wilson has appeared on BBC News, BBC World Service, BBC Breakfast, Newsround, and various other international news outlets. As a preacher’s daughter from the Bible belt and internationally respected academic, Wilson brings both an authentic and measured voice to the academic analysis of the American Christian Right.